La Pierre Blanche – The Worst Gite in France?

This website records our experiences in the summer of 2013 when we visited La Pierre Blanche gite complex in L’Epinoux, close to Aulnay, and Nere in the Poitou Chartens region of France. I have put this together because during our stay Paul, the owner of the site, has begun to remove all website presence that permits feedback. His TripAdvisor page has gone, as has his listing on Owners Direct. I put this here in the hope that anyone considering this hovel for their holidays can at least be made aware of what awaits them.

I have been a regular French Gite holiday maker since the mid-1980s. Back then the accommodation was most often a converted farm building on a working farm with all of the associated rural charm and basic but comfortable French countryside amenities. Much has changed since then and a bonus for me with my own family now is that we can holiday in places where small clusters of gites share more luxurious facilities such as heated pools.

Last year we stayed for two weeks at an excellent site La Petite Ferme, on the Brittany-Loire border and had a truly wonderful time with both the host couple who lived off-site but locally enough to know the area and to come to the site each day to open the pool and keep everything in excellent order, and with the other families holidaying at the same time.

So in 2013 we decided to go a little further south to Poitou Chartres and a little more up-market with a Gite at La Pierre Blanche. I'm actually writing the beginning of this review from the gite at the end of the first week.

1 - Exterior Les Vignes and Farmhouse

In short, we have made a terrible mistake. This place is a shambles. It's awful. It's verging on the indescribable.

La Pierre Blanche is owned by a couple who are based in the UK. They're in the UK now. They employ the least capable pair of 'managers' you're ever likely to meet to look after the running of the gites. Frankly, they're clueless. The Vignes gite we are staying in has a few things about it to annoy and disappoint, to at least spoil, but not ruin a holiday, but compared to the problems everywhere else on this site we live in luxury.

The gites are in a poor state of repair. The fixtures and fittings are ancient, grubby, uncomfortable, insufficient and an insult to the paying public. A property that sleeps six should, reasonably, have a bare minimum of six knives and forks, but at £800 per week it would not be unreasonable to expect a few spares. As it happens there is no cutlery drawer, the stuff just sits on the counter-top in a plastic tray, so they being few may be a bonus.

The crockery is all Ikea. I appreciate that things get broken and that there's an expense in these areas, but this is pretty low-rent. There are only wooden chopping boards, which may be rustic, but isn't hygienic. The cooker has no grill. There is a greasy extractor fan above the stove with an equally greasy light hard-wired into it.

It also would not be unreasonable to expect bedding for all of the bedrooms. Curtains in a child's bedroom would be, you would think, an obvious requirement. Fortunately we are able to partially cover our son's window with the sole tea-towel provided. The bedding is at least 10 years old and if you want it swapping between weeks one and two there is a charge, though the mattresses looked quite new (a damp problem probably, as the mattress in the dampest of the gites was replaced in week-two when we the residents found it to be covered in mould beneath the mattress protector).

2 - Sweet dreams

The towels appear to pre-date the property.

A single, shared, washing machine is provided in a shed outside. At the moment there are 18 of us here and the place isn't full. A sign above the machine instructs that a payment of 3 Euro is required per wash (when we questioned the owner about this the sign disappeared, unfortunately it was stuck to the instructions for the antique washing machine).

Once you’ve done your washing you can dry it here. If you want…

There are two moth eaten dust-bound couches in our property, they are ancient. If I was paying low-end money for the place I could perhaps overlook some of this, but when some people here this week are paying £1500 per week, these things are inexcusable.

The world's smallest television sits in one corner. It works with the DVD player below. The DVD player has an English plug.

Now, as it happens we don't particularly need the DVD player or TV, but when I asked about an adaptor the managers told us they could go to the supermarket and buy one if we needed it. How can they not have noticed it was missing and anyway how can they not have an adapter knocking around?

The website for La Pierre Blanche states that it is "a paradise for the children". The stairs in all of the gites are unsuitable for all children, they are barely passable by adults. Steep, narrow and unenclosed, in the farmhouse the stairs are unnecessarily steep and the bannister has been repaired to bring two separate sections together with a single piece of what looks to be Meccano. The stairs in La Vignes have a window at the bottom, if the window is open the stairs are impassable.

One of the wall lights in our gite is hanging loose of the wall. I firmly believe that it is secured only by cobwebs.

In the bathroom, despite their being ample room for a separate shower, an over-bath shower is provided. Aside from it being nigh-on impossible to achieve a temperature between freezing and scalding, the bath is supplied with a broken duck-board arrangement which slides up and down the bath. I have no idea why this is here.

The cold water feed to the toilet leaks onto the floor where a pipe-joint is fractured. The managers left us a half-used bar of soap and a previous occupants’ toothpaste smeared on the blinds. Mr Tickle would struggle to reach the toilet roll dispenser when seated on the toilet.

The bedrooms are all musty, if not outright damp. No one has unpacked, we're all living out of our suitcases. The unpainted walls are damp stained. Oddly there is a gap running around the edge of all the floors showing light and allowing noise from below. There is nothing attractive about any of the rooms, they've very utilitarian, basic, not comfortable. We have a couple of pictures of Paris and some stock art dotted about the place, others have pictures that have literally been cut out of magazines and stuck into ill-fitting clip frames as their art. It's all very uninspiring and unloved.

There were a couple of bulbs blown in our property and one missing completely, an odd way to start the season.

We rented a three-bedroomed gite, but the managers did not make, or supply bedding, to make the bed in the second bedroom as we have only two children and they presumed that they would share the smaller room. They were affronted when we asked for bedding for the additional bed and said that they never normally make up extra beds. I paid for this excellent level of service.

This is the only gite I've visited that does not have a visitor’s book. Often a useful source of information of good local restaurants, family friendly attractions and general bits and pieces of the local area. I can only presume that they either rotted (as some of the eclectic mix of paperback books left have), were eaten by the ants, or were so full of profanity that the owners were compelled to destroy them.

We are the first summer visitors to this gite this year, the site is only open May to September. The managers were very keen that we understand that the gite is provided clean and must be returned clean or they charge 40 Euro to clean it. If this is what 40€ gets you then someone somewhere is having a laugh. We were sweeping up rice and crumbs from previous guests, who knows when they were here, last summer? In any case the stated "cleaning products" that the manual for the gite said were provided were entirely inadequate or absent.

Elsewhere on site one gite (farmhouse) is infested, overrun, completely packed full of ants. They are nesting in the ceilings and walls and are on every surface. Flying ants are literally swarming in the bedrooms. One bedroom is a corridor with a bed partitioned off with a curtain. It has the most diabolical shower setup you've ever seen.

3 - Words fail me.

A third property, La Grange, has mould growing up the walls.

The guests have had to remove everything fabric from the property. The wooden kitchen utensils were rotting in the drawers (at least they have drawers!). The mouldy property is sold as a three-bedroom gite. What is not explained is that the double bedroom barely fits a double bed and has a full-sized door to the outside in it.

4 - A tight squeeze

Above this is an open mezzanine which opens onto the main living area, on this mezzanine, separated only by a bookshelf/wardrobe combo, are the two “bedrooms”. The stairs to the mezzanine are unsuitable for children, the bedrooms are not bedrooms.

5 - The loosest interpretation of bed"room" in France

Note the beer bottle (for scale, and because you’re going to need the alcohol). The beam between the two “rooms” is 5ft off the floor.

 Along with all of the gites, the stairs are a hazard, the outside step is no better.

6 - Watch yer step

The shower has an innovative water saving feature… the shower tray overflows after 90 seconds use.

That said, I’m unsure you’d want to spend much longer in there in any case

The owner, when contacted about all of the above suggested to each of us in turn that we should visit the Tourist Information office in Aulnay and try to find somewhere else to stay; on the first week of the summer holidays. He would then give us a full refund.

If you drive 16 hours with two infants and three children under 7 and six adults, arrive to find your property knee deep in ants or dripping with mould, you don't expect to be offered a refund, you expect someone to move heaven and earth to recover your holiday.

The swimming pool has a latch-gate which a four year old can open (see below) indeed unless you specifically close the latch it never closes itself properly. It’s possible that a three year old could open it, but we didn’t have one to hand.

7 - Security is our watchword

There is a pool alarm, which is effective, but it can't be heard from most of the gites and anyway this seems entirely inadequate, the pool should be inaccessible to minors. There is no indication of the deep end vs. shallow end. The tiled surface around the pool is dirty with several years' worth of moss growth in the grout and on the tiles.

8 - No Mick Jagger

9 - We're assured that the pool area is cleaned daily

Some tiles are loose, where the grout is exposed it is razor sharp, my son currently has his foot bandaged from a 2" gash he got at the edge of the pool.

The managers clean the pool each morning before 9:30 according to the manual provided. The majority of the time the residents have to do this themselves.

Neighbouring dogs use the otherwise very pleasant park area as a toilet. The residents clean this up too. The neighbouring cats use the swimming pool as a toilet (this seems extremely unlikely I know, but this is what we are told by the managers when excrement was found in the pool).

The site also boasts a children's park area. This is a nice, shaded field with ample space to run around, play games etc. There is a very basic swingset and a sandpit. The sandpit is one of the saddest things I've ever seen. It looks like the owners found it by the side of the road.

10 - It's the pits

Note on the sandpit picture above, that’s a child-size picnic table, the “sandpit” is ~2 feet across…

When we asked about the nettles and deadly nightshade growing in the verges around the gites the managers did remove the weeds etc. from outside our gite, but before then it was obvious that no maintenance of the outside space had been done at all.

Speaking of outside, anyone fancy a barbecue?

11 - Take me to your leader

During our second week the whole situation descended into farce. The gite managers became even less helpful and more obdurate, we had stand-up rows with them about their lack of assistance and effort around problems with the houses and pool. We were told that we should not be contacting Paul the owner, but that we should come to them only. When we pointed out that we had asked them for most of the things we'd asked Paul for and had not received any help we were told that we might have to "jog their memories". The problems that all of us onsite had with the managers culminated on with them closing the pool on our final day, waking us up to inform us that the pool had been "vandalised".

12 - Four Screws! Nothing in the gites is this well secured!

This was complete and utter nonsense, a second edging stone had come loose the previous day, but this was no surprise, and in no way comprises vandalism. The managers padlocked the gate, but the spirit of La Revolution endures in France and we removed a single screw to afford entry. As the managers didn't return between the early morning visit and our departure the next day we don't know what they made of our jailbreak or the children’s modifications to their "pool closed" signage.

13 - Now that's what I call vandalism!

The pool is advertised as “heated”, and it does indeed have the capacity to be “heated”:

14 - Il ne marche pas

However, during our stay on each occasion that I checked, the power to the pool heating was not turned on.

15 - We're not power users

The room hosting the pool controls was also home to the chemicals required for vermin control and chlorinating the pool. As you can see below the room was freely accessible, at least on some days, and the chemicals were left open and simple to obtain.

16- Yummy! Help yourself to some chlorine, or some rat poison!

Further excitement was provided in the second week when it was discovered that the loud buzzing sound and obvious swarming around the roof of one of the gites (the dampest one) was caused by over 60,000 bees nesting in the roof. The honey dripping through the ceiling into the children's bedroom was also a bit of a giveaway.

17 - Hi Honey!

We know there were over 60,000 of them as the bee-keepers told us so.

18 - Vertiginous apiarists

Up on the roof was an interesting sight

They had never seen a nest so large and having removed a large section of it (free honey!) they retired...

19 – bucket of free bees

…when the light failed and said they'd have to return to remove the whole roof.

Some of the minor things have been addressed while we've been here, but the bigger problems, which stem from the shocking attitude and approach of the owner will likely never be resolved. La Pierre Blanche is an effort to extract maximum possible financial return for absolutely bare-minimum investment and maintenance. What could, and should be, a tremendous holiday destination is a complete disaster area. The families leaving this week cannot wait to get on the road, those of us here are offering spare bedrooms and beds to the families infested and mould-bound and dreading the arrival of next week's replacements who have to discover this on-going farce anew.

Local neighbours told us that the site had been on the market for sale for over six years. They also said that preparation for the new season (we were there in week one, sadly) started a mere two days before we arrived. Another (beautiful) local gite owner said that they take several weeks preparing their properties, and they live permanently on site.

Owners Direct list around 700 gites in Poitou Chartres, there are over 50,000 holiday lets in Brittany alone. I have stayed in some very basic accommodation across France, but never have I felt so fundamentally ripped-off and exploited. Everyone involved with this place should be ashamed, it is a disgrace. Seek an alternative, look elsewhere, do not come to La Pierre.